Author Topic: Sentence Attempts  (Read 30440 times)

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Ruben

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Re: Sentence Attempts
« Reply #45 on: June 19, 2011, 06:21:23 am »
I hear ya, i'll keep lurking and learning. Then maybe one day i'll be able to assist a person newer to this than me.

Qvaak

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Re: Sentence Attempts
« Reply #46 on: July 21, 2011, 01:58:51 am »
Once again I offer attempts to be crushed under your sharp eyes. This time I found myself wondering, how would you say all the basest simple and general life saving things in dothraki. I found no useful list on the net in ten seconds, so I made my own 10 item list of things you'd better know how to say on any relevant language in primitive surroundings. These aren't dothraki culture specific. Dothraki despise both foreigners and weakness, so many might actually be rather hasardous to be uttered before a group of dothraki warriors. Then again, the situations may vary. You might encounter women or slaves, you might even find that even though the people you met aren't dothraki, the only language you share is theirs.
More than anything this was a stress test on our (my) limited vocabulary and fragmentary grammar. The sentences are certainly abound with errors - and full of unnatural structures even when tecnically right. You should never try to learn correct dothraki from sentences created by your peers, but maybe proving me wrong and doing better by yourself might be a good excercise.

1.) Please do not kill me!
Vos addrivos anna, zhey chomak!
 ~ Don't kill me, sir!

2.) I come in peace.
Anha jadak ma athchomaroon ei atthiraraan.
 ~ I come with respect towards all life.

3.) Please help me!
Zhey vichomerak, erinas anhaan!
 ~ Sir, show me kindness!

4.) I am very thirsty. Can you give me some water?
Anha sekke fevek. Hash shafka laz azhi loy eveth?
 ~ I'm very thirsty. Can You give me some water?

5.) I am very hungry. Can you give me some food?
Anha sekke garvok. Hash shafka laz azhi loy hadaen?
 ~ I'm very hungry. Can You give me some food?

6.) I don't undersand what you're saying.
Anha vos charok astikh shafki.
 ~ I don't understand the things You are saying.

7.) I am a foreigner. I understand only very little dothraki.
Anha ifak, majin kash anha charak lekhes dothraki, kash anha charok loy as disse.
 ~ I'm a foreigner, and thus when I hear dothraki, I understand only some words.

8.) Do you speak westerosi?
Hash shafka shili lekhes andahli?
 ~ Are you familiar with the language of andals?

9.) I'm travelling to Westeros, but I'm lost. Can you show me the way?
Anha verak Rhaeshaan Andahli, vosma vos nesok os rekaan. Hash shafka vidrie anna?
 ~ I travel to the land of andals, but don't know the way there. Will you guide me?

10.) I want to have sex with you.
Anha zalak sajat yeraan.
Anha zalak m'anha nem asajak ki yeri.

 ~ I want to mount you.
   I wish that you would mount me.

laughably long and meandering comments:
1.) Simple Vos addrivos anna! might well be the safest choice, but I think a bit of coating with respect is probably just appropriate. Depends on situation. I use the informal imperative. I have a feeling the meaning reaches easily from commanding to simply asking. That's the way it seems to usually work in languages I've met. If it retains the air of command (like the formal imperative very likely would), couple of the sentences are already severely off on that account.

2.) I don't think we've yet met a word for 'peace'. Dothraki might not even have a word for overall state of peace, though I'm sure they have many words around the concept. Athchomar athiraraan is based on the idiom Athchomar chomakaan. Sure, the stucture might not be generalizable. Or maybe I should have done something with the ei.

3.) No 'help' known either. Kindness was best I could come up with. Even more, I use almost certainly intransitive verb with an object (in allative). It seems some intransitive verbs can have non-standard uses with objects in specific cases. We don't know that this verb would, but repicient class would fit it so nicely, I decided to roll with it. I still try to accomodate "please" with "o respectful one". Dunno. It just seems appropriate.

4.-5.) These might have no major problems, I think. Somehow I'm a bit doubtful about garvolat and fevelat. Do I use them right? Are they even analogous to each other in their use? Garvolat seems /-o-/ kind of verb while fevelat seems just to happen to end it's stem with e. How about hadaen? A strange word I don't think I've ever seen in use. Even eveth might turn out to be animate and thus wrongly declined. And how about loy? Can you use it with uncountables like water?

6.) Why not just Anha vos charok as shafki, why try to create a possible word that might have just slightly more fitting meaning? Hell if I know.
I think I'm beginning to understand the meaning of /-o-/. It seems to be used to rise the activity level of the verb. I think Peterson said as much, but it took some time and comparative analysis before I think I really get the gist of the situation. With stative verbs the change seems to be pretty staightforward: statives tell you that something is in a static state. The /-o-/ version tells that the thing reaches the state in question. "The fabric is ripped" becomes "the fabric becomes ripped" (or better: "the fabric rips"); "I know that" [Yeah. Not all statives are of the type "to be"; not all of them are intransitive either] becomes "I'm learning that" (or more literal: "I learn that"). Some words aren't stative, but nevertheless passive actions, so the subject can still take more active role in the action: "I hear you" becomes "I understand you". Even with kemat, the main action is between the main and the secondary object, so to my thinking kemolat has more actively participating subject. There are couple of dubious cases, but none I can see that really challenges the theory.
Now let me sidetrack myself into a rant: Natural languages aren't nice and logical. They are dodgy and stupid. That's wonderful. English is full of homonyms, homographs and homophones and nearly every common suffix is the same /-s/, sometimes written with apostrophe, but pronounced quite the same. Finnish has at first glance less homonyms, but the same stem can have hundreds - techically even thousands - of inflections, so words starting very different can end up homonyms when inflected. This is much less a problem than any sane universe would allow. The homonyms have radically different meanings and cases/conjugations are usually different too, so the context and syntax tell us quite clearly, what the sentence should mean. People creating puns have a field day, but that's just a bonus. So when every third suffix in dothraki is /-i/ and words still also often end in i, I just chuckle and go "So true to life! Sooo true!". But then there are word pairs like charolat and charat and the line seems to be crossed. Both of these seem like transitive verbs, so syntax shouldn't be a big help; the difference in meaning between them is slight but relevant, just so that it should be hard to tell from context, which word was used... And when you conjugate them, they become the same: Vos charok! I dont understand! And this doesn't seem to be a singulary event, but quite regular result of dothraki derivational morphology. It's hard to believe this kind of difference would just be lost, but where I'm I going wrong? Should I just try believing harder?

7.) This was another hard one to translate to the limited vocabulary. I just couldn't find any words that would mean anything like "small amount" or "little". Even if I could create some passable adjective through negative comparison, I'd still need to find a noun to attach it to. Pretty much everything seemed highly speculative or super clumsy.
Well, even with all the complaining in the last paragraph and all the clumsiness of the structure, I quite like the juxtaposition between charak and charok here. You may also notice that this time I was content with as instead of astikh. Still no real reason.

8.) Peterson has said, I hear, that dothraki prefer shilat instead of nesat when speaking about knowing a language. Makes sense to me, actually. Nesat seems to be rather narrowly defined word for knowing information, and if you don't speak about encyclopedic knowledge about the use, history etc. of a language, then you wouldn't use that. Shilat seems to be pretty close to "to be familiar with". Languages are not usually intellectually known, you just can kinda magically speak them: if you know it well, you don't knowingly weave the syntax together, attach suffixes, translate words... To dothraki this should be even more so. The most advanced teaching process for foreign languages is probably "X is said Y, repeat Y." You repeat and repeat and then just know.. and there knowing is more of a familiarity or ability than intellectual knowledge.
Engish "to know" has a very wide scope. I like to, again, compare to finnish. I think we use mainly three words on the area of english knowing: tietää (to have knowledge of), tuntea (to be familiar with) and osata (to know how to). For knowing a language I'd use "osata" rather than "tuntea", but almost certainly not "tietää" (though I'd prefer a structure with "to speak", as I did in the original english line. That just seemed to open too many other problems). Finnish is again at least somewhat in sync with dothraki. Nice.

9.) This was actually relatively easy to approximate, I think. I don't think we have seem a word rekaan (or even rekoon), but that is probably one of my most conservative made up words. I'll be a bit surprised, if there is no such word or if it would not fit at least approximately in the context.

10.) Oh yes. Sex. Just had to throw that in the list. Primitive needs and all. But of course even in a racy series like GoT good words for such important activity are scarce. I went with sajat+allative. Vezh fin saja rhaesheseres uses sajat with accusative, but I'm not even sure if that is meant to be mounting in the sexual sense. Daenerys uses allative, if ingsve's transcript holds, and it might have a bit less permanent state setting feel.
One other big problem, though, was the gender divide of dothraki society. Of course a woman might well just use the sentence. Daenerys sure straddles Drogo: men mount women like horses mount horses, women mount men like men mount horses, eh? But for the people wanting to embrace the feel of medieval style repressed gender, I made an overtly submissive version.
Having used the passive (ha! of course) in the second version, I must wonder, if you can translate specific verb class into passive. The object is normally in nominative there. Can it be in other cases?
Game of Thrones is not The Song of Ice and Fire, sweetling. You'll learn that one day to your sorrow.

ingsve

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Re: Sentence Attempts
« Reply #47 on: July 21, 2011, 03:40:52 am »
3.) Please help me!
Zhey vichomerak, erinas anhaan!
 ~ Sir, show me kindness!

One way to get around using a direct object with a stative verb could perhaps be to use a proposition. I imagine that might work. Something like Zhey vichomerak, erinas h'anhaan! perhaps. Or it might just be that stative +abl/all is an example of some verb class as well.

4.) I am very thirsty. Can you give me some water?
Anha sekke fevek. Hash shafka laz azhi loy eveth?
 ~ I'm very thirsty. Can You give me some water?

5.) I am very hungry. Can you give me some food?
Anha sekke garvok. Hash shafka laz azhi loy hadaen?
 ~ I'm very hungry. Can You give me some food?

7.) I am a foreigner. I understand only very little dothraki.
Anha ifak, majin kash anha charak lekhes dothraki, kash anha charok loy as disse.
 ~ I'm a foreigner, and thus when I hear dothraki, I understand only some words.

Me and ValekLost discussed this on IRC yesterday. It seems that genitive might also indicate partitive concepts so it might be that when you use loy you should also mark the noun with genitive.

Example: Ezas loy alegri h'anhaan.

Garvolat should probably be seen more as "to grow hungry" just as  haqolat means "to grow tired". "To be hungry" is probably just garvat. Hadaen was a word that Richard added I think. It might have come from twitter or something like that.

Other than that I can't find anything to comment on. Well done.

As for the various speculations, your guess is as good as mine.
"I just need to rest, that’s all, to rest and sleep some, and maybe die a little" – Samwell Tarly

ValekLost

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Re: Sentence Attempts
« Reply #48 on: July 21, 2011, 11:04:07 am »
So can we say "loy + noun (gen)", as one of the ways to express "partitive", at the end or still we need the ultimate truth from David?


2) No known 100% sure term for "help", but in the dialogues Mirri Maz Duur says "I can help the great rider with his cut"
Ingsve transcribed it with "Anha laz ovlak dothrak vezhvena ozisoshan mae". So "to help" could be "ovlat".
Qotho reply with "The Khal needs no help from slaves who lie with sheep" - "Khal zigeree vo rahelehar safroon fini govi oqet." so..if "rahelehar" is the right term, whatever it could means, it is used as "help" (noun).  ???

BTW, beyond the grammatical accuracy of the sentences, I think it would be funny to guess what way is the better one to express a concept through the Dothraki culture.
Example:
Are we sure that asking a Dothraki to "show kindness" is a good idea? :D

For all the rest, I'll read it with more attention tomorrow:D

ingsve

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Re: Sentence Attempts
« Reply #49 on: July 21, 2011, 02:04:23 pm »
So can we say "loy + noun (gen)", as one of the ways to express "partitive", at the end or still we need the ultimate truth from David?

We still need to confirm it I think. There can be other things going on that we don't know about.
"I just need to rest, that’s all, to rest and sleep some, and maybe die a little" – Samwell Tarly

Qvaak

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Re: Sentence Attempts
« Reply #50 on: July 21, 2011, 11:53:31 pm »
Quote
One way to get around using a direct object with a stative verb could perhaps be to use a proposition. I imagine that might work. Something like Zhey vichomerak, erinas h'anhaan! perhaps. Or it might just be that stative +abl/all is an example of some verb class as well.

Goshdurnit! I absolutely should have thought about prepositions. I seem to keep forgetting about them. The version you offer is much more likely grammatical than my dubious recipient class scheme.

Quote
Me and ValekLost discussed this on IRC yesterday. It seems that genitive might also indicate partitive concepts so it might be that when you use loy you should also mark the noun with genitive.

Example: Ezas loy alegri h'anhaan.

humm.. maybe. We have three examples from the series:
Ogi loy mawizzi. — Kill some rabbits.
Ezas loy alegri h'anhaan. — Find some ducks for me.
Hash yer ray tih loy alegra? — Have you seen any ducks?
I think this is very inconclusive evidence. Mawizzi is in either nominative or genitive, alegri seems to be in genitive, alegra in nominative. Loy might designate a different case when meaning "any", or it might have the same meaning in all three sentences and the difference between "some" and "any" might be just due to translation. Might be a verb thing and have nothing to do with loy at all.
Nah. You're probably right anyway. San jani seems to translate into "lots of dogs", loy alegri translates probably the same way into "some of ducks". Do these determiners decline, then? Can you say "I stabbed at some (of the) dogs": Anha vinde loyaan jani.
I guess this too had slipped through without close examination. Not that "any" instead of "some" would be a big miss, but right now it seems accusative might mean nothing sensical at all or even something entirely else. "Can you give me the little water you have?" for example would not do.

Quote
Garvolat should probably be seen more as "to grow hungry" just as  haqolat means "to grow tired". "To be hungry" is probably just garvat.

Oh yes. I'm sooo stupid. Didn't I, in the same post, write a ponderous paragraph on the very topic of /-o-/ verbs being state changers, "active". In the LCC4 paper Peterson list fevelat and garvolat side by side on the same "source" class and translates them as "to thirst" and "to hunger". I'm guessing, despite of the name of the class, that rather than Anha garvok athezhiraroon! translating to "This dancing makes me hungry!", it translates to "I hunger for dancing!" (and, if there isn't figurative depth available, that probably makes no sense at all), so "to hunger" and "to thirst" might be contextual translations, and more generic translation might indeed be "to grow hungry" and "to grow thirsty. This would mean we have no inkling on "to be thirsty"..

Quote
As for the various speculations, your guess is as good as mine.

Doesn't stop me from guessing :)

Quote
No known 100% sure term for "help", but in the dialogues Mirri Maz Duur says "I can help the great rider with his cut"
Ingsve transcribed it with "Anha laz ovlak dothrak vezhvena ozisoshan mae". So "to help" could be "ovlat".
Qotho reply with "The Khal needs no help from slaves who lie with sheep" - "Khal zigeree vo rahelehar safroon fini govi oqet." so..if "rahelehar" is the right term, whatever it could means, it is used as "help" (noun).  ???

Yeah. We can hope that we'll soon know, how you say "help" in dotraki, but the unaffirmed transcripts are so vague source, I didn't really even really think about picking new words from there.

Quote
BTW, beyond the grammatical accuracy of the sentences, I think it would be funny to guess what way is the better one to express a concept through the Dothraki culture.
Example:
Are we sure that asking a Dothraki to "show kindness" is a good idea? :D

I commented on this in the start of the post already, but ... yes and no, I'd say. I don't like to think of the dothraki as an entirely homogenous mass of cruel cardboard copy barbarians of ultimate badassery. There are different kinds of dothraki, women, men, old young, succesful, outcast...
On the other hand the culture is kind of single mold culture, so the differences aren't that big: One set of truths, one set of values, one role to play, one goal to aspire to... Even if women have a different "one role", most of the things are the same. Meet an old poor dothraki woman and she still will likely despise you for being a foreigner, and she will probably think you worthless, if you are weak and pleading for help.

Views of dothraki culture often flow into our language conversations. I have had an idea of creating a discussion thread dedicated to conversation about dothraki culture; I have even considered creating dothraki culture hub on the wiki research and analysis section (underused and unupdated now that most attention is on the learning section), where most insightful, educated and deep dothraki culture related discussion threads could be linked from sites like Westeros.org.
Not that I would do any such thing. It's just a nice idea.
Game of Thrones is not The Song of Ice and Fire, sweetling. You'll learn that one day to your sorrow.

Qvaak

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Re: Sentence Attempts
« Reply #51 on: August 02, 2011, 07:27:32 am »
A new month, a new crah-zee sentence attempt.

Rek odriva fin vil chila annakhmenaan, ma kash firesofosorof nem veshilae, kash sekke athdrivar laz adrivoe.

Nothing much there that isn't questionable or just pretty certainly wrong. When I learn more, I'll try to fit it in a meter and rhyme, too :)
Game of Thrones is not The Song of Ice and Fire, sweetling. You'll learn that one day to your sorrow.

ingsve

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Re: Sentence Attempts
« Reply #52 on: August 02, 2011, 08:33:19 am »
A new month, a new crah-zee sentence attempt.

Rek odriva fin vil chila annakhmenaan, ma kash firesofosorof nem veshilae, kash sekke athdrivar laz adrivoe.

Nothing much there that isn't questionable or just pretty certainly wrong. When I learn more, I'll try to fit it in a meter and rhyme, too :)

That was a though sentence to translate.

"That is not dead that manage to lie down to the unstoppable and while the Great Years are forgotten then death itself could kill."

That's probably wrong since it doesn't make any sense.
"I just need to rest, that’s all, to rest and sleep some, and maybe die a little" – Samwell Tarly

Qvaak

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Re: Sentence Attempts
« Reply #53 on: August 02, 2011, 01:27:15 pm »
Quote
"That is not dead that manage to lie down to the unstoppable and while the Great Years are forgotten then death itself could kill."

That's probably wrong since it doesn't make any sense.

I wouldn't say wrong. Not exactly what I was trying to say, but mostly close enough considering how much had to be guesswork. For Cthulhu Mythos / Lovecraft fan that would probably be enough to be able to recognize the line I was aiming for: "That is not dead which can eternal lie; and with strange eons even death may die."

You probably noticed that rek and jin are animate and singular. The writing is about a god (not from Martin's mythos, of course, but as Martin has quite open references to Cthulhu Mythos, this resonates strongly with the Drowned God), so I felt this is approproate.
odriva is meant to be a stative verb version of negative of supposed adjective driv, "dead". I guess you got it right as you didn't use future, even though I thought that would be pretty hard to intuit / decipher.
Rek odriva is thus supposed to mean quite exactly "That is not dead", but on the "He is undead" side of the meaning.

I used vil instead of laz mainly because I didn't want to use the same auxiliary-thing twice and I knew "may" would turn in my limited skill to laz. The exact scopes of the words are still very fuzzy and "that which manages to eternally lie" was to my thinking anyways pretty close to the original intent.
My guess would be that chilat (if such word even exists) is a stative, so I'd think vil chila is more "manages to keep on lying" or "manages to be lying" than "manages to lie down".

Annakhmenaan is, of course where my speculative derivational morphology began to go over the top. Nakhmen as an adjective "endless" is quite probable word. I needed a temporal endlessness, eternity, so I threw in the temporalifying /aCC-/ prefix. Of course there was the problem with the same /aCC-/ meaning "to cause to". Neither "unstoppable" nor "eternity" is likely to be grammatically correct derivations and it is even less likely that they are real (diegetical) words. The bright side of this is that if one is a real word, the other probably still isn't.
Thinking about this now, I think I would have had much higher chances with avvosaan. We know that avvos is a word for "never", but as far as I can remember we don't know, how ablative and allative work with it. "Until never" might well turn into "forever", though "nevermore" is I guess more probable.

Firesofosorof is, I think, a nice construct. Not that it would likely exist as an established word. I meant "A big bunch of years." (it could of course as well be "A bunch of exceptionally great years.")
I would have put that in plural, too, but, alas, the word ended up inanimate. Firesofosor could mean anything from "bunch of years" to "lifespan", and even to "roundabout millenia", so firesofosorof, if it really meant just a larger span of time, could mean anything from "many years, like twenty or something" to "the entire timespan of the universe". Still, pretty good, eh?

Then there is veshilae. The word I started with is of course shilat, which is marked (as I'm quite certain it should be) to conjugate as shil/-at/. It means, more or less, "to be familiar with", so if there is a negative, eshilalat, that should to my thinking be something like "to be strange to" or "to not comprehend" - something stronger or more specific than just "to not be familiar with", as that would not need an own word.

The end isn't that interesting. I didn't know, where to put the sekke or if it would really work anywhere the way I wanted it to.
The only clear error at the translation, I think: adrivoe is a future 3rd person singular of drivolat, "to die". "To kill" is addrivat. [I haven't paid attention to this earlier, but the "to cause" versions seem to be usually built of stative rather than active versions of the words.]

In short: That/(he) is.not.dead/(is.undead) which/(who) can/(manages to) lie(supine) "forever", and when aeons/(great.many.years) are.strange/(are.incomprehensible), then even/(itself) death may/(can) die/(will.die).
Many connotations might be perfect in the lovecraftian framework.
Game of Thrones is not The Song of Ice and Fire, sweetling. You'll learn that one day to your sorrow.

ingsve

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Re: Sentence Attempts
« Reply #54 on: August 02, 2011, 01:59:49 pm »
Ya, the die vs kill was just a sloppy mistake. And I think I was a bit hasty with forgotten as well. Forgotten would more be the negative of remember rather than to know.

An interesting attempt overall though. It really stretches the things we know very far to fit the intended words.
"I just need to rest, that’s all, to rest and sleep some, and maybe die a little" – Samwell Tarly

Qvaak

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Re: Sentence Attempts
« Reply #55 on: August 18, 2011, 03:30:39 am »
Ei ki: "Os!"
Ko ki: "Ai."
... Ko ez os ma me em ma me an.


Using ei all by itself is rather unlikely to be grammatical. Maybe it should be Ei at.. ...everyone! HAH!
« Last Edit: August 18, 2011, 10:11:01 pm by Qvaak »
Game of Thrones is not The Song of Ice and Fire, sweetling. You'll learn that one day to your sorrow.

ValekLost

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Re: Sentence Attempts
« Reply #56 on: August 22, 2011, 02:44:17 pm »
OMG XD
You're totally crazy, you know? XD